Assigning Blame for Poor School Performance: A Look Backwards
In an article that Sarah Deschenes, David Tyack and I wrote a decade ago we examined the historical mismatch between schools and the students who attended them. In one section, we laid out how reformers over the past century have framed the problem of children and youth failing in schools. I ask readers to determine which, if any, of these four explanations for failure are currently being used.
The full article and endnotes can be seen at: http://www.tcrecord.org/PrintContent.asp?ContentID=10773#_edn41
A. Students who do poorly in school have character defects or are responsible for their own performance….[L]ocating responsibility in the individual—a response with deep roots in American ways of thinking—has been the dominant way of framing the problem. In the educational system of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this manifested itself in a focus first on character deficiencies, which reformers believed children could overcome, and later on students’ low IQs, which students were thought to have no control over. Labels like ne’e-
